Reviewing Requirements for Testability

8 November 2017No Comment

Modern software development approaches like Agile support a strong collaboration between all member of the software development team, software testers and business analysts included. Even if you don’t use a method like Behavior-Driven Development or Specification by Example, checking the fact that you will be able to actually test your requirements is a good thing. In his article, Richard Ellison share some best practices to reviewing requirements for testability from the point of view of a software tester.

His main advice is that the software testers should review requirements before the formal reviews and send questions to the business analyst in advance. Unanswered questions should be written down to have a reference point to get clarification with the larger team. He recommends to document everything in requirements review meetings. He uses a spreadsheet and lists the requirement number and the comments. If a new requirement will be added add, an additional row in the spreadsheet is added with the comments about the new requirement. You can add a second column to identify as testable or not.